AND THE BLACK ANGEL
And the black angel of my igneous outrage
warps space into a negative shape
like a mold
and pours itself out in words
like metal drawn from savage ore
into a flaming sword.
I live in the twenty-first century.
I want to kill something in a way
that gives death a whole new meaning
liberates it from the living
like an entirely new outlook on life.
I used to look up at the summer constellations
and wonder about the night
but now I labour on the nightshift
along with millions of other slaves
and when I look up at the sky
on a cigarette break
all I can see
are the brutally twisted stars
of the barbed wire that surrounds me like the Milky Way.
And we all live under the same sign
like a halfway house on day parole
in the inner city slums
of a re-zoned zodiac
waiting for the funds to arrive
to turn all these dumps into skyscrapers.
The ants stroke the peony like a planet in bud
to tell it when to bloom
and a big star walks into the room
and everyone pales in its light like the ghosts
of who they might have been
if they weren’t so green with potential.
So many die like flies against a windowpane.
So many have been uprooted like weeds from paradise
they’ve stationed legions of spears like gates
and hot-wired high walls like nightclub bouncers
around the last blade of grass that grows in Eden.
But the facts don’t begin where the metaphors stop.
I’ve folded the scimitar of the moon
like eleven dimensions
of Damascene steel
to give it an uncompromising edge
to cut through the napes
of the hydra-headed succubi
who crush us in their coils
like corporations who want to get close to us personally.
Banks are evil.
Credit-card companies are evil.
The blackjack dealers in the casinos
of the health insurance companies are evil.
Boeing and Northrup and Wall Street are evil.
Haliburton is evil.
The cell phone company and Ontario Hydro are evil.
A man who franchises the vote to everyone
by selling guns to theocratic children is evil.
The Vatican that hates
the female principle of life enough
it’s become a gynophobic hive of celibate bees
molesting the flowers of the children
like priestly sunspots perverting
the honey of their innocence
like the pollen of the original sin they stick to
is evil.
And the pimp-daddy cable company
that hooks its clients up like a dealer
to a bad drug that’s been buffed by government regulation
is evil.
And the contractor in Iraq
who feels that life is just a video-game
you play with real people who bleed
to prove your dick’s as macho as your rifle
and you’re true to your tatoos
is evil.
The reciprocity
of atrocity for atrocity
like the balance of vengeance in the holyland
that gouges one eye out
for the other that was gouged out
of the same face
they both turn toward God
bleeding and blind
who says vengeance is mine
as they ask for a truce
in their trade relations with hate
and white phosphorus flowers over Gaza like jellyfish
and no birds sing in the branches of the candleabra
that is planted in quicksand like peace
on another man’s land.
Evil makes one master
a slave picking oranges
in the groves his grandfather kept like goldfish
and makes the other
the thief of his own heritage
as his children age faster than time
can keep up to them like a war-crime.
And the politicians walk and talk
like men at a safe distance
who are sure of their medical plans
and the leniency of their indexed pensions
discussing cuts in welfare cheques
and chemotherapy
to keep the rich from suffering
the rising costs of compassion
and even the devil
keeps his word to God like cancer
never to forgive them.
It’s one thing to be killed by a tiger
that doesn’t need to steal what it eats
but it’s altogether another
to die slowly to meet the demands
of leeches maggots and tapeworms
colonizing the meat on your plate
like your heart your blood your eyes.
Can’t you feel their eggs
hatching like rice crispies
and boring into your forehead
like the foreign policies
that govern your everyday thoughts?
Life rots before it’s dead now
and death has grown as lean as a crackhead
on the morsel of flesh that’s left to take to the grave
as a token of what’s to bury.
Everyone’s looking for fireworks at the end
of the Mayan calendar
when time goes extinct
and the Four Horsemen of Revelation
trample the earth like hail in a vineyard
but my black angel moves like the shadow
of a hashashim down
from the top of his world mountain overview
through the night
like the eclipse of an anticlimactic apocalypse
and puts the blade of the new moon
up to the jugular of all those
who have lived like anti-matter
on the dreams of others
and bleeds them like an oilslick
that has dirtied the water it whored.
PATRICK WHITE
